François Hollande got off lightly with his lightning strike

French president François Hollande should consider himself a fortunate man. Inconvenient and embarrassing though it was to have to delay his encounter with German Chancellor Angela Merkel because of a lightning strike on his plane, others have suffered far worse ‘flashes’ of indignity.

A lucky escape for Monsieur Hollande?

My eyes water at the thought but last week while walking in Madrid César Casado was struck by a lightning discharge that apparently shot up from his feet and legs to his scrotum where he received burns. Although he remained conscious throughout his ordeal he was unable to move his lower limbs and was rushed to hospital where luckily he soon regained mobility and suffered no ill effects to his heart or brain.

It got me thinking about the Guinness Book of Records. In my salad days when I worked as a records invigilator with the books’s founder, Norris McWhirter, he liked to remind me of the sad story of Roy C Sullivan, a park ranger from Virginia in the United States, nicknamed “Human Lightning Rod”. He was apparently the only man in the world to have been struck by lightning seven times. In 1942 he lost his big toe nail (I’m being serious), in 1969 his eyebrows, and in 1970 had his left shoulder seared. Then it got a whole lot worse. Between 1972 and 1977, he had his hair set on fire, his ankle, chest and back burnt badly and his newly grown back hair set on fire again. Perhaps, waving a white flag at the sky, he decided to put an end to his torment because he took his own life in 1983. All the same Norris disputed this point, telling me that Mr Sullivan’s demise was not caused by lightning’s relentless pursuit of parts of his anatomy, but more to do with the poor man being rejected in love.

And on the subject of lightning records, Mr Hollande should indeed thank his lucky stars that his unfortunate plane made it safely back to Paris when one considers that in 1963 a Boeing 707 jet airliner was struck by lightning in the USA, killing 81 passengers.

So should you find yourself walking in the park and spy a flash of lightning, don’t be fooled into a false sense of security by that perky, little idiom about lightning not striking twice. As Roy C Sullivan learnt to his cost, it’s simply not true.